3 Answers
3

First of all, it is important to understand the distinction between sharing and file permissions. In Windows, you set up sharing to create a network share. When you add users to the sharing permissions, you are giving those users the ability to access that share remotely from another computer. From your description, it doesn't sound like this is what you're trying to do.

File permissions are separate, and dictate which users can see a file. They are also referred to as ACLs, or "access control lists". Every file and folder has an ACL, which specifies which users are permitted to do what with that file.

ACLs keep track of users by their SID. An SID is a string of characters which uniquely identifies each user and group on the computer. Even if you rename a user, their SID remains the same; likewise, if you have two users with the same username on two different computers, their SIDs are going to still be different.

A few "special" accounts and groups have the same SID on every system. These are system-level accounts in the NT AUTHORITY domain. If you give permissions to one of these accounts, those permissions persist across all Windows computers. This is what you'll want to do.

Right-click on the drive and choose Properties. Go to the Security tab - not the sharing tab.

Click edit. You should have a list of the users who currently have permissions on this drive. Click Add, and type Everyone in the box, then hit enter. The account "Everyone" should now be shown. Click the checkboxes to give it full control, then click OK.

Next, click Advanced, then Change Permissions. Check the box for "Replace all child object permissions with inheritable permissions from this object". This will assign the permissions you just created to all folders on the drive. Click OK. It will take a while for the permissions to propogate. Then, click OK until you've dismissed all the dialogs.

This should give Everyone full access to all folders on the drive on all computers. If that for some reason doesn't work (though it should, as I've done this before), post in the comments and we can try to figure out what's going on.

Based on prior comments, I suspect this is still just applied to an everyone group on the local system.
–
Joel CoehoornFeb 1 '11 at 22:05

@Joel Coehoom It should still work everyone means "everyone" so there are effectively no permissions. @nhinkle is simply pointing out that he needs to apply folder/file level permissions as well as sharing permissions for everyone. By the way Excellent Answer @nhinkle!
–
KyleFeb 2 '11 at 0:11

@JoelCoehoorn, if you reread my section on SIDs and system-level groups, you'll see that "everyone" does apply to all computers. If you'd like to read more technical documentation on it, see "Managing Authorization and Access Control on MS TechNet. It explains all of this and more in great detail from a conceptual level.
–
nhinkle♦Feb 2 '11 at 2:49

I believe it's supposed to, but I think he might have a bug/glitch of some kind that's preventing it from working
–
Joel CoehoornFeb 2 '11 at 3:20

But... Why do I have to do this? Folders created on a flash or portable drive are generally accessible on another PC. Did I mistakenly enable something? Is there a way to disable this feature that assigns permissions when I create a folder? I understand having folder permissions under C:\Users, but not elsewhere.
–
jp2codeFeb 3 '11 at 16:05

But this is just a simple portable drive. Why do I have to create an access control list for a portable drive? Why is Windows insistent on creating an owner for it?
–
jp2codeJan 30 '11 at 23:30

Because every Windows file has an owner, even if that is the local service account. The OS doesn't know your intentions in wanting the files to be world-readable and why would it assume the unsafe option? They assume the safer option and force you to explicitly override it.
–
T.RobJan 31 '11 at 3:21

1

Because the filesystem is NTFS, and ACLs are NOT optional. If you don't want to deal with ACLs at all you could reformat it as FAT32, but you would lose some functionality (the most obvious being limited to a maximum 4GB file size).
–
LukeJan 31 '11 at 14:51

Have you tried setting the sharing permissions to Everyone Read/Write? Right-click a folder, go to the sharing tab, click the Share button. This will open the File Sharing window. Click the dropdown arrow to select "Everyone" and click the add button. Then click on the Read permissions level to change it to Read/Write.

You must have ownership of a protected
folder in order to access it. If
another user has restricted access and
you are the computer administrator,
you can access the folder by taking
ownership.

To take ownership of a folder, follow
these steps:

Right-click the folder that you want
to take ownership of, and then click
Properties.

Click the Security tab, and then
click OK on the Security message (if
one appears).

Click Advanced, and then click the
Owner tab.

In the Name list, click your user
name, or click Administrator if you
are logged in as Administrator, or
click the Administrators group. If
you want to take ownership of the
contents of the folder, select the
Replace owner on subcontainers and
objects check box.

Click OK, and then click Yes when
you receive the following message:
You do not have permission to read
the contents of directory folder
name. Do you want to replace the
directory permissions with
permissions granting you Full
Control? All permissions will be
replaced if you click Yes. Note
folder name is the name of the
folder that you want to take
ownership of.

Click OK, and then reapply the
permissions and security settings
that you want for the folder and its
contents.

I've tried that on this PC (D630). Then I go to another PC (EBMC) and I see that it is shared with "D630\Everyone" but I still can not access it with "EBMC\Everyone".
–
jp2codeJan 31 '11 at 13:25

2

The problem there is that "Everyone" refers to every user on D630. If you're logging in from EBMC as a user that doesn't exist on D630, it won't work. If it is a different user name it will usually ask you for a user name and password, but if it is a user that exists on both PCs, but has different passwords, it will usually just fail. I think you can add Anonymous to the list which should prevent the need to authenticate.
–
TofystedethJan 31 '11 at 21:21